The Mountain Dweller
by Reid Phantom
Summary: He had been born to a mountain dwelling clan of Pooka. His life had been happy and peaceful. Then they had attacked. Horrible dark beasts with pitch black skin and empty white eyes. He got away and ended up safe on Earth.


He had been born to a mountain dwelling clan. Its name is unpronounceable for humans, but it most closely translates to Cold-fern. His clan was a peaceful place, untouched by the war that ended just a few short weeks before he was born in all ways except the shortage of supplies it faced when the trade routes went down. His mother had been pure white and had a name that translated to mean the soft white clouds that signalled peaceful weather. His father, hailing from a clan from farther south, was a dark grey-brown and named after a tree similar to some of Earth's evergreens. He never was able to figure out what his own name translated to as Earth does not seem to have anything resembling the creatures he was named after - or if it does, he has never seen one or heard its name - but he figures it does not matter much as it is rather similar to one of the silly names humans use.

He was pure white when he was born, but after just a week, his spots had begun to show. If you looked closely, you could see they really started on his forehead, but the grey spots only became noticeable on the back of his head, just above his neck. The spots trailed down his neck and back, across the backs of his wings, and stopped just before his tail. Around the same time, the tip of his tail darkened to match the color of his spots.

He was a playful thing, always running around and playing tricks. He would often terrify his mother by using his talons to climb to the tops of the tallest trees before gliding down. His mother hated it, but his father just laughed it off, telling her not to "smother the boy." He was a curious thing, too. He liked to follow the oddly shaped people that would visit his clan sometimes, bringing supplies to help heal their town. They spoke in an odd language that he would one day look back on and say how it resembled the languages of humans. Lunarians, his mother called the people. She told him stories about how they came from a distant world and had worked alongside the meadow dwellers and a few other people from other worlds to end the war and bring about peace. She said that aside from their own people, Lunarians were the most advanced people in the universe.

He was still very young the day the Lunarians started panicking. He still is not sure why they had started panicking like they did or how they knew something bad was about to happen. His memories of that day are vague, filled with terror and confusion. He remembered he had been walking around with his mother when the Lunarians suddenly started shouting in that language of theirs. He remembered his mother had scooped him up and held him close as she ran to his father. He remembered his mother telling him that everything would be okay as the three of the were guided onto the Lunarians' ship with some of the others of his clan. He remembered looking up over his mother's shoulder, even as she told him not to, when the screaming started. He remembered seeing beasts, horrible dark beasts with pitch black skin and empty white eyes, burst from the shadows of the trees and attack the members of his clan who had not entered the ship yet. He remembered his mother's hand forcing him to bury his face in the fur on her neck as the Lunarians scrambled to shut the doors to the ship.

There was a few seconds of quiet once the doors closed and the ship began to take off, but then the screams started up again. Some of the beasts had made it onto the ship. His face still buried in his mother's fur, he was not really sure what had happened next, but he could feel his mother running and he could hear the screams. All he could do was tune out everything and focus in just on the feeling of his mother's safe arms around him. The next thing he knew, he was being ripped out of them. He screamed until he realized it was his father holding him. His father set him down inside of… something as he yelled at his mother. "It's the only way. It's not big enough for us. There are meadow dwellers off world. I've set it to take him to one of them. Until then, he'll be sleeping. He'll be safe." Then his father shut whatever it was he was in.

The next thing he knew, he was waking up in some sort of metal basket to a large sound. He opened the basket to see that instead of the sleek design of most of the Lunarians things, the basket was twisted and ugly, like something had destroyed it. As he woke up more, he realized that the basket was surrounded by fire on one side. He fled, both from the fire and the storm that was going on all around him, sending rain and lightning down on the forest he was in. He ran for a short time before stumbling upon a small cave that he quickly hid within.

Once the storm was over, he left the cave in search of his clan. Eventually, he found himself at the edge of a village of what he thought might be Lunarians, except their hair, skin, eyes, and clothes had been far duller than those of the Lunarians. He would later discover that the creatures were humans.

He tried to approach the humans, to ask for help, but the humans only screamed at the sight of him and the men attacked him. This happened twice more before he stopped trying to make contact. Instead, he used the tricks he had been taught to change the color of his fur. He hid in bushes and trees and the darkness of night. He stole food when he could and watched the humans to learn how to find his own. He learned the humans' language by watching them converse and spying on the elders, the adults, teaching the kits, the children.

One day, remembering how the adults of his clan would sometimes make themselves look like Lunarians, he tried to turn himself human. He was afraid of how they had acted when he had approached them and was fearful of what they would do if they found him. It took weeks to perfect it, but he managed it. His human self was the normal pink-brown of the pale humans and he had brown hair and eyes, which seemed to be common amongst humans. He stole clothes from one village, then quickly moved onto another.

If he had had any understanding of how humans kept track of time at that point, he would have known that it was just over six months after he had fled the metal basket when he ended up injured on the edge of a village that would later become part of the town known as Burgess. He was found by a woman and brought back to her home. After tending his wound and giving him some food, the woman had him explain who he was. He told the woman that his village had been attacked and he alone had survived because his parents had hid him. Saddened by his story, the woman had offered to let him stay with her. As it was, the woman's husband had perished in a hunting accident a few weeks before, leaving her and her infant daughter alone.

Although all of his people had been omnivores, only the mountain dwellers like himself had ever been considered predators. His mother used to tell him that the meadow dwellers ate little to no meat while all the others kept animals in pens. Only the mountain dwellers hunted for meat. It was this fact that helped him help the family that took him in. The sheep the woman owned sensed that he was a predator and followed his commands easily while his superior senses helped him hunt better than the other men. He _never _transformed after moving in with the woman, too scared that he would be run off or worse if the villagers found out, but it never occurred to him that his talents might catch unwanted attention.

It was on his sixteenth birthday, or more accurately the sixth anniversary since he came to live with the woman whom he had grown to consider his mother, that she pulled him aside and told him about how the villagers and admittedly herself had thought that he might be a fae or demon. She told him how they had secretly had the priest test him behind his back. He had passed of course, she had told him, laughing. It worried him that they had suspected him, but it relieved him to know that no one held any belief now that he could be the monster that he was.

All of this is what passed through his mind as he stood up and smiled at the girl who'd grown up to be his sister. He knew what was coming next and the only thing he could think was that he couldn't believe this was the way he was going to go. After everything that had happened, after surviving the attack on his clan, after managing to survive monster-hating humans and keeping his secret from his new family for just over seven years, he was going to die by _drowning_? The idea was just so _ridiculous_ that he gave a small laugh just before the ice broke and he fell down into the depths of the lake, the freezing water immediately stealing away all the air in his lungs.

* * *

**Here's my take on a pooka!Jack backstory. I was thinking about it earlier and I thought it was odd that whenever there's a pooka!Jack, he's always either a bunny like Bunny (only a lil bit more Arctic hare) or he's either a dog or cat. Pooka's are shapeshifters right? And the books say that their actually alien shapeshifters. So why on earth (or any other world) would Jack need to resemble an earth creature? I mean, even Bunny doesn't completely look like a bunny (more so in the movie than the books unless we're talking about multi-armed Bunny). Movie Bunny's more of a rabbit-kangaroo-human hybrid.**

**I based the form of mountain dwelling pooka (Jack's race of pooka) off Jack's movements in the movie really. His feline moment of walking along the fence, the way he floats in the wind like a snowflake instead of flying, and the way he perches on his staff like a bird being the biggest factors. They're mostly feline-like in form with slit eyes like a cat and a feline jaw set, only set back to give them a shorter muzzle, similar to Bunny. They've got retractable claws like a cat, but their shape more closely resembles a bird's talon. Their wings, while shaped like bird's wings, are actually used in a similar fashion to flying squirrels. Covered in feather-like hairs, the wings are too small and weak to function as actual wings, but they are capable of giving a boost when the pooka's jumping from branch to branch in a tree and allow for gliding from tree to tree. They also have similar uses when navigating rockier terrains as well. Their ears are cat shaped, but smaller like most arctic animals to help protect them from the cold winds and weather that are prominent in the mountain regions. They're sense of hearing and smell are similar to canines, making them good trackers which helps considering their terrain makes it too hard to domesticate animals and farm so they utilize foraging, gathering, and hunting methods to acquire food. Their social patterns are also similar to canines as they tend to stay in large clans with six or seven families tending to all share a den together and with males and females working together in packs to hunt. With mountain pooka naturally being very sociable, it really explains why being so isolated hurt Jack as much as it did. It also didn't help how young he was. During their first five years, Pooka actually age at a faster rate than humans, at least physically and intellectually (as in intelligence not mentality). So while he appeared ten years old to his adoptive mother he was only about four or five, making him about twelve when he became a spirit even though his human form looks like a seventeen year old.**

**Some background info for things that might not be too clear:**

**- Lunarians: my headcannon name for Manny, Pitch, and Emily Jane's people.  
****- The war: The fearling war that was ended when the fearlings were locked away in the prison.  
****- The beasts: fearlings, this was meant to take place when Kozmotis freed the fearlings, becoming Pitch Black, and the fearlings ransacked the pooka homeworld  
****- Meadow dwellers: Bunny's race of Pooka  
****- The metal basket: a hibernation pod. Kinda like an escape pod, but it put whoever was in it into a sci-fi stasis coma until the occupant is released. When Jack's father sent him off, he was sending him to one of Bunny's people who had left the pooka homeworld as ambassadors, unknowing that they had already been taken down. Instead, it locked onto Bunny, who would have been fleeing with the first light, and followed him to Earth. The pod crashed on earth and laid dormant their until the storm unearthed it and damaged it, awaking Jack.**

**So yeah, this is just me headcannoning. Hope you liked it!**


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